Know this has been posted for a while, but I've been wrestling with what to say... This piece somehow got under my skin in a way that meant a simple "Awesome, thanks!" just didn't seem quite right. Or quite enough... and yet I wasn't sure what words fit.
Mostly, it seems, every time I read it, I get a sense of something missing. Not that the vignette isn't complete in and of itself, but it's complete almost as a conversation overheard in a subway might be complete ... it has a very definite beginning and end: people embark, people disembark and unless one follows them home, that is all of their story one gets to hear. Most people's stories are sufficiently banal that, more likely than not, that is all one *wants* to hear.
Rarely though, one of those passing conversations leaves one wondering – why did they sound so worried about cousin Dmitri visiting town? who said the black rooster wasn't good enough because of a single red feather? and with the noise of the tracks that word I didn't quite hear couldn't have been Baba Yaga, could it? I mean the baba part was clearish ... but ...
Like such a conversation, this piece left me wondering about the came before and the comes after in a way that somehow takes it out of fiction. It codes, somehow, as part of an ongoing experience, as though there might be a flipped page ... or a delay between subway stops ... and suddenly there would be more to these characters lives than is captured here.
Oh, heck ... and if none of the above makes any sense, please ascribe it to cold meds gone overboard and pretend all I said was: "This vignette is awesome. Thanks!"
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Date: 2011-05-19 04:45 am (UTC)Mostly, it seems, every time I read it, I get a sense of something missing. Not that the vignette isn't complete in and of itself, but it's complete almost as a conversation overheard in a subway might be complete ... it has a very definite beginning and end: people embark, people disembark and unless one follows them home, that is all of their story one gets to hear. Most people's stories are sufficiently banal that, more likely than not, that is all one *wants* to hear.
Rarely though, one of those passing conversations leaves one wondering – why did they sound so worried about cousin Dmitri visiting town? who said the black rooster wasn't good enough because of a single red feather? and with the noise of the tracks that word I didn't quite hear couldn't have been Baba Yaga, could it? I mean the baba part was clearish ... but ...
Like such a conversation, this piece left me wondering about the came before and the comes after in a way that somehow takes it out of fiction. It codes, somehow, as part of an ongoing experience, as though there might be a flipped page ... or a delay between subway stops ... and suddenly there would be more to these characters lives than is captured here.
Oh, heck ... and if none of the above makes any sense, please ascribe it to cold meds gone overboard and pretend all I said was: "This vignette is awesome. Thanks!"